Cohen’s Theory of Criminal Behavior

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Albert Cohen’s theory mainly deals with the problems of status adjust­ment of working-class boys. He holds (1955:65-66) that the young people’s feelings of themselves depend largely upon how they are judged by others. The situations in which they are judged, most notably the school situation, are largely dominated by middle class values and standards, which in fact is the dominant value system.

These standards include such criteria as neatness, polished manners, academic intelli­gence, verbal fluency, high level of aspirations, and a drive for achievement. Young people of different origins and backgrounds tend to be judged by the same standards in the society, so that young people of lower classes find themselves competing for status and approval under the same set of rules.

However, they are not equally well equipped for success in this status game. For this and other reasons, the lower-class children are more likely to experience failure and humiliation. One way they can deal with this problem is to repudiate and withdraw from the game and refuse to recognize that these rules have any application to them. But, this is not quite that simple because the dominant value sys­tem is also, to a degree, their value system.

They have three alternatives before them:

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(i) To adopt the ‘college-boy response’ of upward mobility (thrifty, hard work, cuts himself from the activities of peers),

(ii) To adopt the ‘stable corner-boy response’ (does not surrender the upward mobility idea but is neither thrifty nor cuts himself from peers nor incurs hostility of either middle-class persons or delinquent boys), and

(iii) To adopt ‘de­linquent response’ (completely repudiates middle-class standards). Of these alternatives, most of the children adopt the third response. They re­sort to reaction formation. They reject the dominant value system and develop new values which are non-utilitarian (because they do not bene­fit economically), malicious (because they enjoy at others’ cost and suffering), and negativistic (because they are opposed to the accepted values of the larger society.

The propositions in Cohen’s theory may be stated briefly as follows (Kitsues and Dietrick, 1966:20): The working-class boy faces a charac­teristic problem of adjustment which is qualitatively different from that of the middle-class boy. His problem is one of ‘status frustration’.

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His socialization handicaps him for achievement in the middle- class status system. Nevertheless, he is thrust into this competitive system where achievement is judged by middle-class standards of behaviour and per­formance. Ill-prepared and poorly motivated, he is frustrated in his status aspirations by the agents of middle-class society.

The delinquent sub­culture represents a ‘solution’ to the working-class boy’s problem, for it enables him to ‘break clean’ with the middle-class morality and legiti­mizes hostility and aggression without moral inhibitions. Thus, the delinquent sub-culture is characterized by non-utilitarian, malicious and negativistic values as an attack on the middle-class where their egos are most vulnerable. It expresses contempt for a way of life by making its opposite a criterion of status.

Cohen’s above theory has been critically examined both as a theory of the delinquent sub-culture and as a theory of delinquency. Sykes and Matza, Merton, Reiss and Rhodes, Kobrin and Fine stone, Kitsuse and Dietrick and Wilensky and Labeaux have questioned various proposi­tions and implications of his thesis.

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The main criticisms are:

(1) A gang member does not reject middle-class values and standards but adopts techniques of neutralization to rationalize his delinquent behaviour (Sykes and Matza, 1957);

(2) If Cohen’s theory is accepted, the delin­quency rate of lower-class boys should be higher in areas where they are in direct competition with middle-class boys and their rate should be lowest in areas where lower-class is universal. But Reiss and Rhodes

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(1961) found that the more the lower-class boy was in minority in school and in his residential areas, the less likely was he to become a delin­quent;

(3) Kitsues and Dietrick have challenged Cohen’s statement that the working-class boy measures himself by middle-class norms;

(4) His description of delinquent sub-culture as non-utilitarian, malicious and negativistic is inaccurate;

(5) Cohen’s description of the working-class boy’s ambivalence toward the middle-class system does not warrant the use of the ‘reaction formation’ concept;

(6) The methodological basis of the theory renders it inherently untestable; and

(7) The theory is ambigu­ous concerning the relation between the emergence of the sub-culture and its maintenance.